Tag Archives: Georgia Extension

Managing the Seedbank by Plowing

Roundup has bred quite a few mutant weeds, such as marestail and ragweed that haven’t yet made it to Georgia. But the king of mutant superweeds everywhere is Palmer Amaranth: pigweed.

About pigweed, Georgia Extension weed scientist Dr. Stanley Culpepper says:

Economic survival will depend on managing the seedbank!!!!
That’s on page 30 of a 46 page presentation at the 2010 Beltwide – Consultants Conference, after discussing how rapidly Roundup-Ready seeds have been adopted:

And how the value of advice on weed control during that period rapidly decreased as a direct correlation: Continue reading

Pigweed: don’t let it come up

So is it just a few people’s opinion that plowing works much better than herbicides to control mutant pigweed?

Henry Gantz writes in Don’t Give Pigweed The Light Of Day, If it doesn’t come up, you don’t have to kill it that farmers were depending mostly on Roundup, but that no longer works, due to multiple mutant weeds, including pigweed and marestail. He quotes Dr. Larry Steckle, Extension weed specialist at the University of Tennessee:

Steckle said we’ve now reached the point where we have to begin thinking in terms of controlling “resistant weeds” instead of “resistant marestail” or “resistant Palmer pigweed” because they are both beginning to show up in the same field.

“We have to manage them both,” he said. “There’s a new product from BASF called Sharpen that I’ve been looking at for five years and I’ve been very impressed with the marestail control. I still like dicamba, Roundup and Gramoxone.

“But if you have Palmer pigweed, too, then you’re going to have to overlap with residuals ― Cotoran, Caparol, Prowl ― to have any chance to do a good job of controlling them.”

So, what’s the solution: Continue reading